I think you are pining for a world that doesn’t really exist. The reason why academia is also ruled by money, status, and power is because it is just a different sector of the economy. The costs and returns will therefore equilibrate with the rest of the economy given the constraints of academia.
If you allow for tenure positions, for example, well there is much reward for having a forever stable high paying and high status job, so you should expect people to pay up to that amount of benefit to get it.
Maybe you pine for the academia of Newton, where scientists could never worry about appearing immediately productive because they had massive amounts of passive income, but that is only possible because of the massive inequality involved, randomly choosing some families to be high class. That academia only existed because of the rest of the economy, which was utter trash, and for the vast majority of history instead pointed potential Newtons toward studying religion instead.
I’m not saying improvements to academia don’t exist, but that you won’t find your solutions by trying to isolate academics from money, status, and power. Or pretending it is independent from the rest of the economy. But by working with these forces, as we do in all other fields we succeed at, to align them with good work.
I think you are pining for a world that doesn’t really exist. The reason why academia is also ruled by money, status, and power is because it is just a different sector of the economy. The costs and returns will therefore equilibrate with the rest of the economy given the constraints of academia.
If you allow for tenure positions, for example, well there is much reward for having a forever stable high paying and high status job, so you should expect people to pay up to that amount of benefit to get it.
Maybe you pine for the academia of Newton, where scientists could never worry about appearing immediately productive because they had massive amounts of passive income, but that is only possible because of the massive inequality involved, randomly choosing some families to be high class. That academia only existed because of the rest of the economy, which was utter trash, and for the vast majority of history instead pointed potential Newtons toward studying religion instead.
I’m not saying improvements to academia don’t exist, but that you won’t find your solutions by trying to isolate academics from money, status, and power. Or pretending it is independent from the rest of the economy. But by working with these forces, as we do in all other fields we succeed at, to align them with good work.